Conservatives frequently have a negative knee-jerk reaction to pop-culture.
Television shows, such as the X-Files, whose premise is explicitly anti-government
and underlying themes implicitly religious, are condemned because of violence.
This conservative response to culture, to immediately condemn and dismiss
popular culture that is profane, sexual, or violent in its content, is
misguided. The mainstreaming of sex and violence and marketing it to preteens
is one thing, but to dismiss our profane pop culture as evil and irrelevant
without examination makes it difficult to learn about the society surrounding
us. The media elite, the highly educated and impeccably dressed folk (conservative
and liberal) who critique the culture, almost never actually understand
or learn anything from the expression they condemn. Sure they talk about
the personalities. Then the conservatives blindly castigate the work,
the liberals wholeheartedly embrace it, the children consume it and no
one stands back objectively to understand the various cultural phenomena
being witnessed.

Eminem, the white rapper whose album the Marshall Mathers LP has taken
the country by storm, is one of these cases. Eminem's work is profane
sexual and violent to the extreme. Michelle Malkin encapsulates the conservative
response perfectly by calling him; "A thuggish performer armed
with a 9mm Smith & Wesson in one hand, two Grammy's in the other,
and a filthy mouth full of expletives." This while the entertainment
press praises him as "peerless rap poet with a profound understanding
of the power of language."

I am not, as Michelle Malkin accuses some, an Eminem groupie who is "willing
to overlook his twisted misogyny and relentless hate because it's all
in the spirit of harmless creativity and hip irony." The press has
reported more than once on the some of the lyrical gems in his album,
ranging from fantasies of raping his mother and killing his wife to the
comparatively mild and routine glorification of drug use. I will not go
into the explicit lyrical atrocities in this space. I do not overlook
the wickedness of his words, but I do attempt to understand and explain
them. How did mainstream culture get so far out of line that we have middle
class 12-year-olds embracing the excesses of the hard core rock and rap
propelling these "art forms" to the top of the pop charts?

The truth is twelve year olds have been consuming such things for quite
some time. We are just recently reaping what we have sown. Suburban kids
have embraced rap since NWA told them to F*** the Police. I am only a
few years younger than Marshall Mathers AKA Eminem AKA Slim Shady, and
I went to high school with fairly conservative upper middle class white
kids who, while college bound, could quote quite liberally from Eazy-E.
Hip-hop culture with its adolescent rage and emphasis on "representing"
one's geographical location provided them with something they had been
lacking: a cultural identity.

In Eminem's video for "The Real Slim Shady" there is an "Eminem"
factory. Guys go in one end looking like individuals and come out all
looking and dressing exactly like Eminem. While in reality the process
is not that rapid, American culture has been running an Eminem factory
for the past twenty years. The baby boomer generation drew up the blueprints
and oversaw the construction of this factory of cultural degradation and
is now amazed at what they created. This generation must take responsibility
for the sons they bore but did not raise. The revolt of the 60's squandered
Western Civilization leaving Generation "M" with no direction
or identity. People wonder how these kids could embrace the angry, misogynistic
posture of the rap culture. G. K. Chesterton once said, "When one
stops believing in God, the danger is not that they will believe in nothing;
but that they will believe in anything."

The counterculture threw out what they viewed as an oppressive and debilitating
culture, which not only led society astray, but also left no real culture
in its place. The 60's counterculture only destroyed; it did not create.
The Baby Boomers left to pursue their yuppie dreams of flash rides, big
houses, and nice clothes all financed with credit cards and mortgages
paid for by the "enlightened" two-income family. No one raised
Generation "M". The elites helped the process immensely by making
the one-income/stay-at-home mom lifestyle culturally passé and
financially impractical. After all, we have a consumer culture to uphold.
The Boomers don't spend much time with their kids. It's okay though; they
are in day-care. The Boomers can always make up for the lack of parental
attention by buying Generation "M" nice gifts like designer
clothes, or maybe some CDs.

The consumer culture compels us to consume products in order to be happy.
Some are caught in this two-income culture that leaves children to fend
for themselves; others choose it. Either way, this is the culture that
bred the Eminem Generation. The cookie cutter, rootless, middle class,
suburban, consumerism gives you no identity. Children robbed of their
own culture will naturally be attracted to a culture that feeds their
anger and exploits their lack of guidance. These angry children, left
with daycare providers and maybe some cash, were told, "Find your
own identity." Well they did.